Warning: long quote incoming, but an excerpt worth reading:
In June 1947, a baby girl named Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California.
Known in her early years as simply “Estelle,” she was raised by a single, widowed mother who worked domestic jobs to make ends meet. Painfully shy and introverted from a young age, Estelle became an easy target for bullying at school, which led her to believe she was “ugly and stupid, clumsy, socially hopeless.” Her shyness combined with mild dyslexia made schoolwork difficult.
In response, Estelle turned inward to her own imagination and outward to the Pasadena Central Library, where she would spend countless hours reading fairy tales and horse stories, and later, the fantasy and science-fiction novels that would eventually inspire her to become a writer.
Despite the odds stacked against her, this young woman would eventually become one of the most successful and influential science-fiction writers of her generation, winning multiple Hugo and Nebula awards (the genre’s highest honors) and in 1995 becoming the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
But Estelle wasn’t always so successful. Her teachers at Garfield Elementary School evaluated her earliest writing harshly, with comments like “Hyperbolic” and “You’re not even trying” scribbled in the margins.2 An elementary school teacher once asked, “Why include the science fiction touch? I think the story would be more universal if you kept to the human, earthly touch.” The teacher reported to her mother that “She has the understanding, but doesn’t apply it. She needs to learn self-discipline.”
When she was twelve years old, Estelle watched the 1954 film Devil Girl From Mars, a sensationalist B movie that was so terrible it convinced Estelle that she could write something better. She recalls, “Until I began writing my own stories, I never found quite what I was looking for . . . In desperation, I made up my own.”
As the possibility of becoming a professional writer slowly dawned on her, Estelle began her transformation into “Octavia,” whom she thought of as her powerful, assertive alter ego. Octavia took on a series of temporary or part-time jobs after graduating from high school: clerical, factory, warehouse, laundry, and food preparation gigs—anything that wasn’t too mentally taxing, and that allowed her to maintain her routine of waking before dawn each morning to write.
The emerging Octavia made three rules for herself: Don’t leave your home without a notebook, paper scraps, something to write with. Don’t walk into the world without your eyes and ears focused and open. Don’t make excuses about what you don’t have or what you would do if you did, use that energy to “find a way, make a way.”
Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain (pp. 145-147).
Noting it here because I’ve now learned more about Octavia Butler’s life and process from a three-page except in a book on taking notes than I ever have in twenty-something years as a science fiction fan, and I’m not sure if that says something about me or about the SF field in general.